A Night of Dumplings

Questions relating to Donald Barthelme's writings are not always easy to answer. Or I should say that they are wonderfully not easy to answer. Barthelme himself, in "Not-Knowing," an essay devoted to the act of writing, stresses the importance, to a writer of fiction, of a certain type of anxiety--the anxiety that inevitably accompanies working without concrete or material awareness of what, precisely, one has to write; or even of how one might set out to write; or whether, for that matter, a thing can be written.

-- Donald Antrim, in his Introduction to Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father

1. Can the anxiety be the anxiety we have had prior to reading this?

2. Is it elusive now, that anxiety which replaced this anxiety?

3. Is there something wrong about acknowledging the beauty of uncertainty through its creation via stories?